In bringing a product or products to market, a marketing department in an organization will typically produce several different marketing campaigns. Often, each such campaign will involve a separate marketing effort, such as web site promotion, electronic mail (“e-mail”) promotion, print mail promotion (i.e., a promotional mailing physically sent using a postal service, rather than electronically sent over a computer network), a web-based event, and/or a live event. Each such effort is typically conceptualized as a different marketing channel, defined by the particular medium used to connect consumers to marketed goods and/or services.
When designing a marketing channel, a developer typically designs and develops content that is provided on the channel to consumers. Each marketing channel (e.g., e-mail, web site, print mail, etc.) may be constrained by different technical limitations, or not constrained at all. Such technical constraints may be different in the case of e-mail and web sites. For example, e-mail and web sites typically utilize two different positioning techniques for content elements. E-mail typically utilizes relative positioning of content elements, while web sites typically utilize both relative and absolute positioning of content elements.
Absolute positioned elements are typically positioned relative to the next positioned element (generally referred to as the “parent”). If there is no parent, then a containment block (e.g., the “view port”, also called the initial containment block) is used. The positioning values are generally offsets relative to the upper-left corner of the parent element or containment block. A resource (e.g., a web site) that utilizes absolute positioning is usually considered to provide a richer presentation of content.
Relative positioned elements are typically positioned relative to the natural flow (e.g., HTML flow) of the document, and the position of an element is offset based on a preceding element.
Because of the different technical constraints involved when designing absolute and relative positioned resources, marketers have typically used two sets of development tools or suites to create, for example, the e-mail and web page. In the case of those tools that do let a marketer design both absolute and relative positioned resources, the syntax and know-how for successfully designing and implementing these resources are different.
If a marketer designs a single channel, then the extra tools do not pose a significant inconvenience or redundancy. However, e-mail channels and web sites often work in tandem to bring together a consumer and a product. For example, an e-mail may be used to initiate the channel with the consumer and then, upon clicking on an advertisement, the consumer is brought to a landing page displaying additional content elements that are an extension of the content elements found in the e-mail. The content elements in the e-mail and the landing page typically complement each other. Nevertheless, developers generally either (1) create these channels with two different development tools because e-mail will not support the absolute positioning layout that provides the richer content found in a web page, or (2) compromise on the less rich content supported in a relative positioning layout.
Thus, there is a need for a single tool that allows marketers to use a single syntax and set of know-how to organize and manage the layout of both absolute positioned content and relative positioned content.